Give your campaign some shape

Too often PR campaigns are just a series of press releases to announce new orders or appointments. Yet with a campaign-based approach you can create so much more impact. The key is to research your market and use that knowledge to generate strong news and opinion content that the media and your customers will react to.

A good place to start is a survey, which helps not only gather valuable market intelligence, but also creates a news hook. And you don’t always need to use one of the big research companies. There are lots of boutique research houses that will conduct a credible survey or you can do your own if you have a reasonable customer database. But you must be honest and if your sample is three blokes in a pub don’t extrapolate the findings to apply to all men over 18.

Once the survey has highlighted the issues or shed a new light on the ones you knew were already current you can then develop a programme of offline and online editorial that will draw attention to your brand. Social media is a vital part of this process in that it can be part of the research as well as being the vehicle for communicating your story.

If you monitor trends relating to your issue then you can reprise the story on an annual basis and show variations from one year to the next. In all of this you must allow for the needs of the media who will want information tailoring to their readership. This means taking a regional or market sector view of the story and coming up with real life examples or case studies well before you go public.